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Drawings from my research on childbirth in California created an opportunity for sharing reflections on fieldwork and “seeing.” Birth is a highly mediated experience, with ubiquitous images of happy, beautiful, peaceful babies and mammas crowding everything from packaging and magazines to instructional literature and advertisements for birth professionals. This birth imagery has a minor counterpart from the activist community that …

A gigantic balloon—pink and glistening—billows up overhead. It is like a womb, or a tumor, filling the huge atrium at the entrance to Patricia Piccinini’s biggest show to date: Curious Affection at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), in Australia. I meet Patricia under this sculpture and she escorts me into a dark room where there is a field of …

Cape Mongo is a multimedia installation that focuses on consumer waste as medium and subject. It is a complex artwork, comprising sculpture using found materials (mostly what viewers would consider waste or trash), performance, and video work. The main narrative feature of the work is a series of fantastical-looking creatures made from either glass, cardboard, tin cans, plastic, VHS tapes …

Waste is a tricky word. In our meditations in Somatosphere, waste hews toward its concrete sense as discard: material byproducts of some transformative process, metabolic or mechanical; things past the end of their wonted, wanted life. Quite literally, waste isn’t what it used to be. It hangs around when and (as Mary Douglas says of dirt) where it isn’t wanted. …

The Graphic Anthropology Field School (GrAFs) is a project launched by Expeditions, an independent network of scholars in the human sciences. For 11 years, we have been holding in Gozo (Malta) a summer school for anthropologists and social scientists, focused on the practice of fieldwork. Far away from sleepy lectures in gloomy classrooms, our aim has always been to …

Tarek Elhaik’s first book—an ethnographic examination of multi-media artists, curators, and fellow anthropologists loosely centered around Mexico City—is a bold, highly theoretical effort to revive something of the experimental ethos of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and the works that …